Spanish scientists buried their own finding of "SARS-CoV-2" dating from March 2019

And won't respond to questions about it.

I had been aware of the story around SARS-CoV-2¹ being found in frozen wastewater samples in Barcelona dating from March 2019, but was not aware that the scientists who had found it - without giving any reasoning - had simply stopped talking about it.

Click on the screenshot of an email below for a substack article giving further details.

In essence:

• The scientists initially reported their finding of SARS-CoV-2 dating from March 2019 in a preprint dated 13 June 2020

• However, in the peer-reviewed version dated 11 March 2021, they failed to mention the March 2019 sample, referring only to later samples.

• The author of that substack - Anthony Colpo - has written to the authors (the picture below) asking them why they didn’t mention the March 2019 sample, but they have not responded.

If they now question the validity of their March 2019 finding, why haven’t they gone public to say so, why haven’t they retracted the preprint, and why didn’t they respond to the emails requesting clarification?

As Anthony says, perhaps the scientists had “either deduced or been told that pursuing the inconvenient March 2019 finding might not be in their best interests”.

I did a little bit more digging into the two papers just to satisfy myself that Anthony hadn’t missed something:

Here’s a little more detail from the pre-print:

Mention of the frozen samples:

The relevant finding in Figure 2, panel A:

Legend to the above figure:

Relevent commentary:

All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide. Barcelona is a business and commerce hub, as well as a popular venue for massive events, gathering visitors from many parts of the world. It is nevertheless likely that similar situations may have occurred in several other parts of the world, with circulation of unnoticed COVID-19 cases in the community.

In the final peer-reviewed version, mention of any frozen samples older than Dec 2019 for WWTP2 has been excised:

But it’s not as if they just decided not to mention any frozen samples at all. The samples for January to March 2020 were also retrieved from frozen archival material - they just don’t mention the earlier frozen samples:

They seem perfectly happy to document and discuss the results from the Jan to March 2020 frozen archival samples, so it’s not as if they suspected any methodological concerns with such an approach.

The results reported below are all based on frozen archival samples. See any doubt expressed about the validity of the approach? I don’t.

So we are left with the unanswered question:

Why did they bury the March 2019 finding?

Postscript:

Thanks to Jessica Hockett for providing a link in the comments below to a June 2020 tweet with a short video clip to a news story about the March 2019 finding.

1. Whatever that is.